Why I read Ibsen
Greg Swann
Why I read Ibsen
In support of my sister, in behalf of the
minds and souls of her students, by Greg Swann
The latter half of the last century was a time of amazing progress for
the West. Average life-expectancy doubled. Infant mortality was halved.
The fruits of science and industry were spreading to even the poorest
of the poor--hygiene, sanitation, bountiful harvests, rail and sea
travel, the telegraph and the telephone, abundant cheap fabrics from
the much-maligned mills of England and America. The simple innovation
of gaslight, precursor to Edison's bulb, effectively extended human
life by half. The year of 1848 was the year of triumph for the
Enlightenment, and monarchies fell all across Europe. The ideals of
Voltaire and Jefferson were everywhere ascendant and humanity emerged,
dazed and wan, from the prison of tyranny, seeming to dance in the
clean, sweet air of liberty.
The latter half of the last century was a time of joy and beauty and
purpose in life and in art, and this is one of the best kept secrets in
the history of the West. Marx convinced the world that people who lived
twice as long and no longer lost half their children in infancy were
not just worse off but _much_ worse off. The philosophers and artists
who had brought the Enlightenment to full flower fell into disrepute
and images of dark foreboding overtook the leisures of the theoried
classes. In the life of the streets there was health, wealth, optimism
and ever-expanding horizons. In the drawing rooms of the elites, there
was pessimism and dark despair.
Into the belly of that fat contradiction, Henrik Ibsen thrust this dagger:
He who possesses liberty otherwise than as a thing to be striven
for, possesses it dead and soulless. So that a man who stops in
the midst of the struggle and says, 'Now I have it,'--thereby
shows that he has lost it.
The dark pessimism of modernity has stained Ibsen beyond all recognition.
We are apt to rank Ibsen as a _Scandinavian_ dramatist, and therefore to
perceive him in the same grim light as Strindberg or Bergman--closed,
cloistered, insular. Soulless and joyless. Certainly this is the
impression one would draw from Steve McQueen's dour Thomas Stockmann;
untutored viewers of that film adaptation could emerge from it never
having guessed that "An Enemy of the People" _is a comedy._ Ibsen was
not a _Scandinavian_ playwright; the ethnic balkanization of Europe is a
manifestation of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth. Ibsen was a
_European_ playwright. His most important works were written in Italy
and Germany, and his concerns did not stop at Oslo or Norway or the
boundaries of Scandinavia.
It is hard for us to imagine a single European culture--even today, with
Europe striving to tie itself together economically. But this was one of
the unintended consequences of the Enlightenment: the middle and monied
classes of Europe had more to unite them than to separate them, despite
differences in language and customs and currency. It was precisely this
trans-national liberal "bourgeois" culture that Marx and others set
about to destroy. And though he was very far from being its champion--it
never had a champion--Henrik Ibsen was the chronicler of this culture.
He gave us Europe dissected and laid bare, exposing all that was hidden
and shameful and deceitful and corrupt. In plays like "A Doll's House"
and "Ghosts", he showed us all that was absent from the poses and
proprieties of middle-class morality. In "An Enemy of the People" he
brought into relief the defects of liberal institutions. "The Wild
Duck", haunting and horrifying, exposes the corrosive influences of
fantasy and sentimentality upon idealism. In drawing rooms overlooking
fjords and garrets perched over dingy streets, Ibsen reveals every last
desperately guarded secret of the nascent bourgeois culture. He is
merciless, a vicious Torquemada of liberal society--and later of the
human soul. His casts are tiny, his sets minimal, and yet his dialogue
is so rich, so loaded with multiple meanings, that he manages to
portray enormous issues in miniature.
But this is not why I read Ibsen.
Henrik Ibsen lived in the Age of Invention, and he alone invented the
modern drama. From the Greeks to Shakespeare to the repertory theater
of the present, the drama has been addicted to certain time-tested,
tried-and-true tricks--virtually guaranteed to stun and awe
audiences--permitting the playwright to effect his meager sleights of
hand. Purloined letters, half-overheard conversations, whispered
conspiracies, twins separated at birth, mistaken identities, _ad
nauseum._ We are all familiar with these ploys; without them, there
could be no TV soap operas. One of Ibsen's most important contributions
to literature was disposing of all that hokum, forswearing _artifices_
of suspense and giving us _real_ suspense instead. What is there in
Shakespeare or Schiller or Scribe to match the raw horror of Judge
Brack subtly coercing promises of illicit sex from Hedda Gabler _in
front of her unsuspecting husband?_
Ibsen began his career as an exponent of the Scribean method of "the
well-made play". His earliest works--now all but forgotten--were court
dramas or adaptations from the Norse sagas, often in verse. "Lady Inger
of Oestraat" might as well have been written by Scribe or Shakespeare.
But in his later works, Ibsen threw _out_ the kings and the courtiers.
He threw _out_ the verse and the verbal affectations. Most importantly,
he threw _out_ the tricks and the traps, the outsized plots and the
outworn plottings. He let mere life speak for itself. And to the
disgust and outrage and amazement and delight of a dazed and wan
Europe, newly liberated, mere life had quite a lot to say.
But this is not why I read Ibsen.
We are redundant when we use the phrase "didactic art". All true art is
didactic and things of beauty that do not enlighten or ennoble or
inflame or horrify are not works of art but merely works of ornament.
There is nothing at all ornamental in the plays of Henrik Ibsen. As an
example, in "The Lady from the Sea", "Hedda Gabler" and "The Master
Builder", Ibsen brings us three different perspectives on the same one
theme: a lover from the past returns and threatens what is presumed to
be the blissful domesticity of the present. This is brutal stuff, and
Ibsen spares _no one_ his boundless brutality. In "Hedda Gabler",
particularly, the awful contradictions of marriage are portrayed in
stark relief. It is common to play Hedda as a neurotic, but I think a
more correct reading is that she is a troll, a sprite, a spark of hell's
fire seeking ready tinder on the Earth. In the cramped confines of a
suburban home, Ibsen brings us the banality of mediocrity in Tesman and
Aunt Juliana, the banality of corruption in Loevborg and Mrs. Elvsted,
and the awful banality of pure evil in Judge Brack and Hedda herself.
"The Master Builder" presents another troll in the character of Hilde
Wangel (who is seen in childhood in "The Lady from the Sea"), and it is
up the reader to decide if she is a troll from hell or from heaven.
Ibsen is wrestling with greatness, wrestling with the gods themselves,
and if his Bygmester Solness loses in the end, it's not the tragedy one
might suppose. Ibsen pairs ambition with frustration, fertility with
sterility, youth with age and a winsome daring with a failed and
fractured courage. For me, this is the most beautiful of Ibsen's plays,
in no small part because of the elemental beauty and innocent, animal
sexuality of Hilde, and it is the one I would recommend first to those
discovering Ibsen.
In these later works, Ibsen bares the very soul of bourgeois culture.
He demands that the reader examine his own life in the glare of Hedda's
piercing eyes, or Hilde's. He leaves the reader no escape, no safe
refuge from which to hide from life. The very best art cleanses the
soul, and Henrik Ibsen is gentle and gravely considerate as he scrubs
you with a brittle brush in the freezing waters of the fjords.
But this is not why I read Ibsen.
I read Ibsen because, uniquely among dramatists, he was able to scale
the universe down to the size of a drawing room, to the size of life.
The Greeks brought us the universal, but the vessel they brought it in
was the universe itself. Shakespeare at his very best is universal, but
his courts and pageants permit the reader to imagine that Lear's
dilemma, for example, applies only to Lear. Ibsen's immense
accomplishment was to demonstrate that the universal is _universal._
Everywhere! In the courts of the glorious and in the hovels of the
benighted. In the subvocal battles of the living room as much as in the
cacophony of savage warfare. In the soul of a decadent and spiteful
Hedda, and in your own soul in your blackest moments. Ibsen scaled the
universal down to the size of your own mind, your own soul, and he
forbids you to escape acknowledgment of your identity.
Henrik Ibsen confronted the newly liberated Europeans and demanded
that they take the _next_ step, liberation from the bonds of their
own hypocrisy, their fears, their prejudices and superstitions.
Unsurprisingly, Europe--and America, and modernity--turned its back
on Ibsen. But truth is that gentle scrubbing from which there is no
escape, no safe refuge. And Ibsen is always waiting by the fjord for
the day when _you,_ brave reader, dare to brace the waters of his art.
Appendix
The very best English translations of the later works of Ibsen are by
Michael Meyer, who also wrote an excellent biography. The Meyer
translations are available in the U.S. in paperback under the
Washington Square Press imprimatur. In the following chronology, the
plays available in the WSP/Meyer translations are denoted by their
volume number (e.g., I, IV, etc.). The remainder of the plays can be
found with effort in English translations, most notably the fairly
clumsy William Archer translations.
Chronology:
1828 born March 20
1849 Catiline
1850 The Warrior's Barrow
1852 St. John's Eve
1854 Lady Inger of Oestraat
1855 The Feast at Solhaug
1856 Olaf Liljekrans
1857 The Vikings at Helgeland
1862 Love's Comedy
1863 The Pretenders (II)
1865 Brand (II)
1867 Peer Gynt (IV)
1869 The League of Youth
1873 Emperor and Galilean (I)
1877 The Pillars of Society (II)
1879 A Doll's House (I)
1881 Ghosts (III)
1882 An Enemy of the People (III)
1884 The Wild Duck (III)
1886 Rosmersholm (IV)
1888 The Lady from the Sea (IV)
1890 Hedda Gabler (II)
1892 The Master Builder (III)
1894 Little Eyolf (IV)
1896 John Gabriel Borkman (I)
1899 When We Dead Awaken (I)
1906 dies May 23
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Shameless Self-Promotion: Two of my stories appear in the February
"edition" of the Electronic Slush Pile on the PureFiction web site:
http://www.purefiction.co.uk/
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We are what we do, not what we say we do.
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